


The World Before We Knew it

by FrankenBean



Series: The World Before We Knew it [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Historical, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-13 22:04:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17496218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrankenBean/pseuds/FrankenBean
Summary: As much as I love the wonderful world J. K. Rowling built, how it captured the imaginations of a generation, there is something to be said about how there is a reoccurring issue with fact-checking in her writing. Everything from Dumbledore leaving a 15-month-old baby on a doorstep on the 31st of October 1981 ( a night where even the warmest parts of the UK dropped to 2 degrees Celcius) to her recent editions on Pottermore which have no grounding in how history works. These are things that have always bugged me, and so I present to you a series of fics of varying lengths relating from everything from Merlin to Marauders. In that way, it is only loosely attributed to the world of Harry Potter but is rather about a world that could have lead to the magical one depicted in the books. The tags and warnings have been kept generic because things like depictions of historical magical wars could happen as well as cutesy fluff of a range of flavours, however, I will be sure to add warnings at the start of chapters that require them. The chapters should be fairly stand alone so don't worry if the work seems like it is ongoing.





	The World Before We Knew it

I feel as though the main issue with fact-checking in the Harry Potter Universe does not come from the books themselves, but rather from a lot of the newer edits on Pottermore. While people have some issues with things not adding up in the books, my primary concern is with things like Rowling saying that Merlin was sorted into Slytherin, despite Merlin being a 6th Century historical character and by her own account Hogwarts being founded in the 9th Century. 

Other issues revolve around things like historical context.  
Castles, for example, do not appear AT ALL in the British Isles until the 11th Century after the Norman conquest and that's only in England, in Scotland it took until the start of the 13th Century. There are only two castles older than the first 11th Century castle in the British Isles and those are Reichsburg Cochem in Germany (only 70 years younger than the one in England) and the Citadel of Aleppo in Syria which dates back to 3000 bc but the vast majority of the structure there dates to the 12th Century.

Now normally, I would just brush all this off with a "the rule of magic means magic happens"thing, but I am genuinely interested in how the historical world would interact with magic at different stages, how would children be educated? In a world with very few magical people in comparison to muggles, how would knowledge spread? And in all honesty, the answers were all there in history, little connectives that would make so much ingenious sense.

Some people will take one look at this writing and be like "dude, chill. It's a children's book series" and that is true and nothing is stopping those people from enjoying the story for what it is, but I still want to create this selection of short stories. I might detail at the start of each chapter a little of why specifically I wanted to write the divergence from what Rowling says on Pottermore, however, primarily I will be taking her work and altering as few key facts as possible so that it would fit into the historical world while still staying true to the fictional story.

I will write short stories featuring original characters as well as historical and mythological characters and perhaps a few about the actual background characters mentioned in the books.

If this isn't something you would enjoy reading, that is fair enough but I'm just going to sit here and indulge my inner history nerd self.


End file.
